THOMAS WOLFE CONFERENCE
Albany, NY, MAY 22-24, 2015
“Wolfe’s America, from the Gilded Age to the Great Depression”
Call for Papers
This year’s conference–located in the capital of “the Empire State”–will explore Wolfe’s contributions to our understanding of America and its development, especially during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The conference will culminate (on Sunday) with a trip to the Hudson River Valley and to the Vanderbilt Mansion and FDR home and museum in Hyde Park, a tour that tells the story of America’s economic development and collapse during this same period, a narrative that informs much of Wolfe’s fiction. During his own sojourns along the Hudson River Valley, and especially during his visits with the family of Olin Dows, Wolfe confronted a wealthy elite that provoked in him a sustained interrogation of social class in America. This experience of “river people” also contributed to his better understanding of class in his own family and region–and, indeed, abroad.
For its 37th annual conference in Albany, New York, the Thomas Wolfe Society invites papers related to Wolfe’s explorations of America–although proposals are welcome on any theme related to Thomas Wolfe and his work.
We are especially interested in papers that engage issues of social class, economics, the Hudson River Valley (its people and places in Wolfe’s fiction), the American landscape or the American psyche, or papers that explore Wolfe’s work within some branch of the American literary tradition.
Please send 250-word paper proposals by January 10, 2015 to: mark.canada@uncp.edu
Please include in the subject heading “WOLFE PROPOSAL.”
